Paint Vault vs Paco
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Paint Vault
Manage your paint collection for hobbies like miniature painting and scale modeling. Scan paint pots, track what you own, find color matches, and plan projects. Works offline and syncs when connected.
- Scan paint pots with barcode recognition
- Track owned paints and quantities
- Color matching from photos
- Find paint alternatives and harmonies
- Manage paint sets and missing items
- Plan projects with palettes and recipes
- Offline functionality
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Your entire paint collection, in your pocket. Paint Vault is the companion app for miniature painters, scale modellers and hobbyists. Browse a catalogue of 25,000+ paints from 121 brands, track exactly what you own, and never buy the same pot twice. SCAN YOUR POTS Point the camera at a barcode and the paint lands in your inventory. Thousands of references are already matched, paint sets included. KNOW WHAT YOU OWN Your inventory, searchable and filterable, with storage locations, quantities, custom paints for anything not in the catalogue, and stats on your collection. FIND THE RIGHT COLOUR - Colour match: photograph any colour and get the closest paints you already own - Find alternatives: out of stock, or switching brands? Get the nearest equivalent - Harmonies: complementary, triadic and analogous schemes, built from real paints All of it runs on CIEDE2000 colour science, the same maths the printing industry uses. COMPLETE YOUR SETS 2,000+ paint sets are described pot by pot. See what is missing from a box before you buy it. PLAN YOUR PROJECTS Create a project, attach a reference image, pin down its palette and write your mixing recipes so you can repeat them months later. SHOPPING LIST Everything you are missing, in one list, ready for your next order. WORKS OFFLINE The whole catalogue, your inventory and the colour tools work with no connection. Everything syncs when you are back online, and your data is encrypted on the device. Available in 9 languages. Free, with ads. Every feature is free - a single one-time purchase removes the ads for good. No subscription.
Paco
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Paco is a paint conversion table and list keeper for miniature painters. Found a recipe that calls for a paint you do not own? Paco shows you the closest equivalents across Citadel, Vallejo and The Army Painter, ranked by how close the match actually is, not by a guess, but by a measured colour distance between the two paints. BUILD YOUR LISTS Keep a list per army, per project, or per shelf. Give each one a name, an emblem and a banner colour, and add paints to it as you go. Lists are grouped by paint category so a long one stays readable. SEARCH THE CATALOGUE Fuzzy search across every paint in the catalogue by name or brand. Filter to a single brand when you already know what you are shopping for. Every result shows its swatch, its hex value, and the equivalents in the other two ranges with a delta score for each — so you can tell a near-perfect substitute from a rough one at a glance. WORKS WITH THE RADIO OFF Paco ships the whole catalogue inside the app. There is no loading screen, no sign-in and no "you appear to be offline". It quietly checks for an updated catalogue when you open it, and if that check fails — no signal, aeroplane mode, hobby shop basement — nothing about the app changes. NO ACCOUNTS, NO ADS, NO TRACKING There is no sign-up, because there is nothing to sign up to. Paco has no analytics, no advertising and no crash reporting. Your lists live on your device and are never uploaded. The app talks to exactly one host, for the public paint colour tables it is built on, and it sends nothing about you with it. Paco is free, and every part of it is. No feature is locked, limited or nagged about. — The Paint Codex design is by Lukas Stordeur (github.com/LukasStordeur). Paint data is derived from the open colour database at github.com/Arcturus5404/miniature-paints (MIT), published by the Miniature Painter Pro team. Paco is an independent app. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Games Workshop Limited, Acrylicos Vallejo S.L., or The Army Painter ApS. Citadel, Vallejo and The Army Painter are trademarks of their respective owners, used here only to identify the paint ranges the app converts between.
Screenshots
Verdict
Paint Vault and Paco are too close to call on the numbers: across 5 compared parameters — price, ads, in-app purchases and device support among them — neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
| Parameter | Paint Vault | Paco |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.0 (3 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 3 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 2 days | — |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPod | iPhone, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 | 15.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 63 MB | 5 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | yann gilles | Musashi |
In-app purchases
Paint Vault
No in-app purchases
Paco
No in-app purchases







